Crowdfunded: A Proven System For Raising Millions

The best way to use crowdfunding – raising money form a large group of people – is to use it as an integral part of your strategy to build brand champions. Get your stakeholders and advocates involved in informing, sharing, and funding your campaign to generate and take advantage of momentum.

Pure and simple, a successful crowdfunding campaign positions your company to pull off much bigger deals in the future.

The optimum framework for success in crowdfunding:

 

The 3 Stages of Successful Crowdfunding

In Stage 1 – Test – you validate your offering demand before your crowdfunding campaign is even designed, and determine your ideal offering positioning and audience targeting. You test offering ideas quickly, cheaply, and accurately using data rather than guesses.

In Stage 2 – Launch – is where you pre-sell and build a large community of buyers who want to invest before you launch. You then aim to hit your minimum crowdfunding target within 24 hours of launching your campaign so your campaign demonstrates serious interest and momentum. You then keep building momentum through upsells and more incentives.

Stage 3 – Scale – is where you take your crowdfunding success and use that to drive even more investments. In this stage, you start to work on your next Target Goals up to your Maximum offering amount.

The whole point is not to look at crowdfunding as the end-game or even as a one-time campaign, after which you live happily ever after. Instead, use crowdfunding to raise your company to the next level, and as a tool to build a highly successful and relatable brand.

Stage 1 – Test

The reality is that over half of crowdfunding campaigns fail. Why? The offering in the crowdfunding campaign is not positioned properly. This is why Stage 1 is all about figuring our who your target investor audience(s) are and how you can effectively communicate the value of your offering to each target audience. Everything else it just window dressing. Test until you know your crowdfunding campaign is going to be a success, and only once you’ve achieved this should you start putting together a crowdfunding campaign.

Stage 2 – Launch

The ultimate aim of all the work you do pre-launch is to make sure you reach your minimum goal amount in the first 24-48 hours of your campaign. If you do that, you build momentum you can then harness to build even more success upon. The launch stage is where you combine, advertising, promotions, campaign updates, cross promotions, and upsells to hit your Target goals and gain strong traction. Success in this stage positions you to do more with funds raised.

Stage 3 – Scale

Stage 3 is where you take the one-time investors who bought from you during the attention-generating stage of the campaign and reach out to them again with an opportunity to invest more or become a referral partner to reach more potential investors. This is exactly what you want to do, because the second degree network of your crowd is where the biggest funding potential lies in wait! This is the final stage of the crowdfunding campaign. This is where you truly capitalize on turning social capital into financial capital.

Recap

Successful crowdfunding is about figuring out the right messaging for your target audience and validating their interest with them before the campaign so that once you launch, your success is all but guaranteed. Once your campaign has generated initial momentum, you want to take advantage of it and pour fuel on the fire to increase your reach and generate more investment from a larger network.